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All students deserve a great education,and every adult working with children needs timely, useful information to support student learning. Effective data use ensures that students aren’t just counted but that each student counts.

Who We AreDQC strives to ensure that everyone with a stake in education—especially families and educators—can access and use quality student data to raise achievement for all students. We are the nation’s foremost organization advocating for effective data policy and use.

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When teachers are empowered with data, students excel. In 2017, the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) partnered with Hope Street Group to ask Tennessee teachers from across the state their opinions about data. Teachers expressed that they value data, use data to help their students learn and grow, and need support to use data to improve student outcomes. States can take action by supporting teachers' efforts to use data to help their students.

Data governance provides state agencies a structure in which to define the roles and responsibilities needed to ensure clear processes for collecting and reporting education data and to ensure accountability for data quality and security. To make informed policy decisions across agencies, such as the state education agency and early childhood, higher education, and workforce agencies, cross-agency data governance is needed. This roadmap provides recommendations for states who are looking to develop and implement a high-quality cross-agency data governance committee.

High-quality data governance, a body or process designed to make decisions about how state education data is linked, used, accessed, and protected, is key to establishing a culture of effective data use in states. The three data governance bodies featured in this paper—the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics (KCEWS), the Maryland Longitudinal Data System (MLDS) Center, and Washington’s Education Research & Data Center (ERDC)—reflect the unique context of each state and have broken down the silos that tend to exist among state agencies that use data to support education and workforce efforts.